A Beyond the Classroom Learning Journey - Grade 5 Open Minds Programme
by Franklyn Heisler, Open Minds Coordinator, Lakeside -
In this article we look at how a Grade 5 learning engagement is constructed, and why the concept of experiential learning is so significant in the CIS Open Minds Programme.
Planning Learning - Constructing the Need to Know in Learning
Building understanding is a journey, one that is designed to move students from their current level of understanding (knowledge) on a given topic to a new point and deeper level of understanding. While it can be virtually impossible to predict how deeply a topic will resonate with each student, the voyage of discovery is both stimulating and exciting.
Building Blocks - Looking at the Unit of Inquiry
This is the structure used to plan a Grade 5 Unit of Inquiry (UOI). The starting point is a transdisciplinary theme, which in this case is, “Where we are in place and time”. This theme is then used to construct a central idea that provides a lens to further focus our learning on specific content for the unit. The central idea for the unit is –“Understanding past civilisations helps us to make connections to our lives today and shapes our future.” The scope of a central idea provides a large snapshot that needs further focusing.
This is accomplished through lines of inquiry:
- Characteristics of civilisations (form)
- How the past and present are connected (connection)
- The effects that artifacts/systems from the past have on our lives today (reflection)
As you may have noted, each of these lines of inquiry have key concepts attached: form, connection and reflection. These various lenses further define and focus the inquiry. It is from this foundation of a transdisciplinary theme, UOI, lines of inquiry and key concepts that we begin to design the learning engagements to provoke, confuse, and inspire the growing and deepening of knowledge and hopefully understanding of the unit’s conceptual umbrella.
How the Open Minds Programme Supports the UOI
One of the key elements in this UOI is the role CIS’s Open Minds Programme plays in supporting student learning. Open Minds is an experiential inquiry programme that takes place outside the classroom. There are significant factors that determine the kind of engagements we build to support the student’s study.
- The sites chosen must be connected to the content of study.
- The resources we use need to enhance and assist in developing either student knowledge and/or understanding.
- Learning engagements need to be, or have the appearance of being, authentic and at the same time challenging, engaging and hopefully relevant to the student’s life.
To provide the necessary breadth and depth of opportunities to explore the lines of inquiry in the Grade 5 unit, four sites were chosen: Asian Civilisation Museum, Chinatown, NUS Cultural Centre, archaeological dig at East Coast Park.
At the Asian Civilisation Museum, students are guided by docents (museum educators) who focus the tour on how the objects in their collection connect to social, cultural and religious aspects of people.
In Chinatown, students follow a guide to a number of commercial establishments – a teashop, an effigy shop, a bakery, and a traditional Chinese music centre. Each location builds on the ways in which the past and the present are linked. In the tea shop, they consider the role tea has played throughout history in Chinese culture both from a dietary and a social perspective; in the effigy shop, the students look at the products that support ancestor worship in contemporary Chinese culture and consider how this worship has changed yet remained the same over time; in the bakery, they explore the role of particular foods as culturally significant, supporting Chinese values and beliefs; and in the music shop, how traditional music and instruments become a way to appreciate the past and influence music today.
An archaeological dig at East Coast Park provides an opportunity to uncover objects that existed in the past. The objects found provide evidence for the students to assess and evaluate familiar and unfamiliar domestic practices.
Last but not least, is a visit to the NUS Cultural Centre where the students use props to develop a linear history of humankind; where they explore the role of archaeology in uncovering evidence of life ways by viewing and engaging with the museum’s exhibitions; where they handle artifacts to spark thinking and where they look at the exhibits that provide clues about daily life, traditions, culture, values and beliefs.
Why we provide experiential learning experiences?
In today’s classroom the main sources of factual learning are books and computers. These secondary resources support fact finding, but what we are trying to do at CIS is ensure a level of related conceptual understanding. Conceptual understanding must include a balanced approach to learning where we blend the finding of facts with targeted hands-on, mind-on real world experiences. Real world experience in balance with relevant factual knowledge can provide compelling evidence to support students in going beyond mere factual understanding moving them towards building related conceptual understanding.
With the introduction of cyber learning in education, teachers are tempted to turn away from hands-on, minds-on experiential learning engagements. As this generation of students become further removed the real world focusing more on the virtual experience, they lose the capacity to observe closely, a skill essential in developing creativity.
The Open Minds Programme helps to hone observations skills by broadening the field of observation beyond the size of a computer screen. In doing so we can also slow down to be more mindful and as a result more aware of our physical environment, the environment that demands our understanding to better navigate within it. If learning is limited to secondary sources, i.e. books and the internet, learning is diminished and so to our capacity to develop depth of understanding.
The Open Minds Programme is an experiential learning programme providing real life hands-on, minds-on opportunities in support of deepening learning. Talking with people, holding bits of history in one’s hand, feeling the thumbprint of a potter from thousands of years ago, digging in the sand to uncover mysteries of the past in the sometimes blistering heat, listening to the stories experts tell that connect us to the objects created by people for people, all of these experiences assist us in forming pictures of how we are intrinsically linked to what came before us. Without these moments of discovery we may not come to understand our complex connections to our world. As the grip of the virtual world grows stronger, we are in danger of becoming disconnected from what truly matters.
As it has been said, “if you do not know where you have been, you cannot know where you are going”. The Grade 5 Open Minds Programme at CIS plays a significant role in helping students to uncover where they have been so that they may look more mindfully at where they are going.